Someday you guys are going to have to tell me how we ended up with a system like this. I know this is not the time to test them and put them through failure, but we’re not doing something right if we’re stuck with these miserable choices.

—President George W. Bush, talking to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson when told it was necessary to bail out AIG

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

—F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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James Stewart, “Eight Days,” New Yorker, September 21, 2009; F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 76.